With the release of CIA documents outlining the enhanced interrogation tactics used on terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks, those on both sides of the issue have debated the effectiveness and propriety of such methods. In a heated exchange on The View Thursday morning, co-hosts Nicole Wallace and Rosie O’Donnell tackled the subject from opposite viewpoints.

Wallace, who served as George W. Bush’s media affairs director, was working in the White House on Sept. 11, 2001, and described the sheer horror that defined that infamous day.

“I was in the building,” she said. “I was evacuated. And I remember the guards saying to me, ‘Take off your shoes.’ I said, ‘What?’ They said, ‘You can run faster if you take those shoes off.’”

As speculation grew that the White House would be the terrorists’ next target, Wallace said she made what might have been a final phone call to her father.

“I took off my shoes and I ran up Connecticut Avenue,” she said, “and I remember calling my dad and I said, ‘They think the fourth plane is coming for us. I love you.’”

After the tragedy of that day, she explained, America’s leaders naturally expected a follow-up attack on U.S. soil.

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“In the months and days after 9/11,” she recalled, “the debate in this country and the debate in the White House where I worked wasn’t whether or not we’d get hit – it was which city was next.”

O’Donnell chimed in that “all of us” were afraid after 9/11.

When Wallace explained that she has received numerous calls from individuals thanking her for “defending the men and women in the CIA who were simply doing their job,” O’Donnell once again interrupted by asserting that she has had similar calls “to say thank you for saying the other point.”

The former Bush staffer maintained her position in defense of the CIA, however, explaining that “for them this was traumatic” and adding that she has “never been more proud to defend the people who walk the line for this country and this city and the city in which I work, the city where my mom and dad live.”

O’Donnell, who has repeatedly questioned the “official story” regarding the World Trade Center attack and suggested Americans who interrogated terror suspects should be tried for war crimes, called Wallace’s motives into question.

“Well, I’m sorry you feel the ends justifies the means,” she concluded, “but I don’t think Machiavellian techniques is really the foundation of democracy in America.”